Simon E, Of course many books influenced me but Dharma Bums made me want to be a rucksack wanderer and fire spotter. I wanted to be out in the wilderness with a hand full of nuts, raisins and high hopes. It was pure escapism for me.

greentara wrote:Simon E, Of course many books influenced me but Dharma Bums made me want to be a rucksack wanderer and fire spotter. I wanted to be out in the wilderness with a hand full of nuts, raisins and high hopes. It was pure escapism for me.

Me too..and I was living in a town in the south of England and used to sit in the nearby woods imagining wilderness.

My most favorite book THAI TIPITAKA...I love love to read Dhammapada/Jataka stories....When I was very young, some monks at the temple told Dhammapada stories when I was with my mom...but the teacher at my girls school really sparked my interest about Dhammapada/jataka, might be because he gave me A all the time, and the school principle chose me to lead the prayer.

It was the german translation of "Cultivating compassion" by Jeffrey Hopkins, german title: "Mitgefühl und Liebe".All thoughts that i had about life I found compressed in this paper back book... Astonishing.This brought me to say "I am buddhist."

What started the ball rolling for me were two T.V. programmes from the late 70's; Kung Fu with David Carradine to a lesser extent (I was only about 6), and then a couple of years later Monkey, based on the story "Journey to the West." I then chose Buddhism for religious studies class project.

we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar - Nietzsche

My first book was Happiness Now which contained some Buddhist quotes. I found it while browsing at the library. This lead to more reading but Awakening the Buddha Within by Surya Das was the one that really laid out the core teachings and set me on this path. I've just lent my son The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying so I'm interested to see where that leads.

If you’re practising Dharma, you practise it for enlightenment. Not for rights, not for freedom, not for justice, not for healing, not for getting better in a worldly way.~Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

I read a bunch but nothing clicked until The Secret of the Vajra World and The Crystal and the Way of Light. After that everything made sense. Before that it was like wearing sunglasses, glossing over "big" words and intellectual phrases with self contempt ( ie, I'm way too dumb to study Buddhism).

Now that I think of it, it was Bhagavan Das' book It's Here Now. Are You? that propelled me to delve into the dharma. Reading his experiences of Kalu Rinpoche, the 16th Karmapa, Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse etc inspired me to take refuge.